Citizenship

An OurKingdom conversation [History: Jeremy Gilbert > Rosemary Bechler > this post > Rosemary Bechler (part one; part two) > Jeremy Gilbert]

Celia Hannon (London, Demos): In April 2007 charlieissocoollike, a 16 year-old vlogger from Bath joined YouTube. So did the British Prime Minister. Since then Charlie has amassed 70,000 subscribers. The Prime Minister has 5,000. These figures betray a very naked truth - young people are not flocking to listen to their presidents and Prime Ministers when they talk to them via internet videos. Instead, they are seizing power for themselves; taking on roles as reporters, distributors, commentators and artists. It seems that while their parents and grandparents won their freedoms by challenging governments, this generation of young people would rather find their ‘route-around’ existing institutions and forms of media.

Alexandra Runswick (Unlock Democracy): I have been more than a little sceptical about the government’s plans for a citizen’s summit on the proposed British Statement of Values. I was worried it might be like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent discovers that the plans for the demolition of his house had been on display for nine months; it’s just that they were on display in a cellar without any lights, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard." So yes, you can be engaged in the policy making process just as long as you are and-picked by a polling company, the government then determines the subject matter, how long the conversation will last and whether the conversation will be followed up by any action. 

Jon Bright (London, OK): Thomas Hobbes' definition of life without the state, the Leviathan, was published in 1651 - but it was based on a document written eleven years previously, during the English Civil War. Hobbes was a royalist - or, at least, he kept company with many exiled royalists in Paris - and it's unsurprising that his theory of the state, needed to keep humans from tearing each other apart, provides somewhat of a foundation for royal (autocratic) rule.

Jake Beavan over at Unlock Democracy tries blowing into the fog to see more clearly what on earth the government is planning.

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): As the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement approaches, there is growing evidence that the inclusive vision of 1998 is being undermined by the Government's more recent obsession with a narrower and more prescriptive identity politics.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): A great story in yesterday's Mail on Sunday: QUEEN FURY OVER BROWN OATH filled its front page. The palace had gone to the extraordinary step of giving the paper an on-the-record-statement: "The Palace was not consulted with regard to the Goldsmith review". Wow, was the Palace showing good judgement? Had it at least understood that being British meant not asking everyone to go on their knees and swear fealty to the monarch? That this would politicise the institution and drag it into disrepute?

Bethan Jenkins (Neath, Plaid AM): The headline of Lord Goldsmith's proposals on British citizenship and Constitutional reform is inevitably that of calling on young people to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen.  The reason - to foster a sense of ‘shared understanding,' and a sense of National pride (though in fact it will be more of a punishment for children, I suspect!)

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The row over citizenship raises some big issues which I'll write about tomorrow, but one of them seems only to have been picked up on in the Daily Mail report and it is a grave indicator of the disgusting corruption of political life that it seems to have gone unremarked elsewhere, even in Tim Garton Ash's interesting and intelligent article today. In two places Goldsmith's report suggests monetarising citizenship:

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Peter Preston's "Malaga to Manchester" in Tuesday's Guardian contained the usual parody of analysis and a predictable panoply of anglocentric mismeasurement of our constitutional log-jam. It's only in this sort of cultural environment that Lord Goldsmith can come up with such Dead Parrot Policy as the Pythonesque pledge to the Queen as a fillip to citizenship (sic).

Billy Bragg (Dorset, musician): The Government are constantly talking about the idea of Britishness yet seem unable to come up with a clear definition of exactly what that means.

I'm proud of our diversity but I admit there is a hole at the centre of our multicultural society - what we need is something to bind us together as citizens.

While it's right there should be recognition when you become a full member of society at 18, asking teenagers to take a pledge of allegiance is little more than a sticking plaster for a larger problem. I support giving young people incentives to volunteer and get involved in communities - by paying tuition fees, for instance. That's a practical way to express your membership of society. It would earn you respect as an individual, and everyone needs that kind of recognition.

Rick Muir (London, ippr): A huge furore has greeted the publication today of Lord Goldsmith's review of citizenship. This is largely due to the idea (floated as an option rather than a recommendation) that young people should be asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Like most people on the liberal-left such a proposal fills me with horror: the idea of repeating those awful occasions at Scouts when you had to salute the flag and affirm your loyalty to the monarch makes me cringe. As a life-long republican, this would mean asking me to say something that I didn't mean.

Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): Encouraging people to commit to social justice, human dignity, equality, civic participation and peace-building is the way to create good citizens, not attempts to impose symbols of state allegiance and inflated rhetoric about "national pride" which we can see manifest in Lord Goldsmith's publication on British Citizenship. Education for civic participation and reform of the constitutional system to encourage democratic accountability would be a much more meaningful way of encouraging common purpose than questionable nationalistic gestures. And making loyalty to the nation state our primary identity also raises deep questions for those who belong to communities shaped by global ethical commitments that go well beyond national or geographical attachments. Good citizens have a wider vision than flag-waving.

Peter Facey (London, Unlock Democracy): We welcome this review insofar as we hope it will kickstart a national debate about what it means to be a British citizen. But despite a few positive suggestions, overall Lord Goldsmith's conclusions are a backwards step.

Lord Goldsmith seems to have a one-size-fits-all 'IKEA' view of nationalism. It is a passive view of citizenship concerned primarily with good behaviour and respecting authority. The emphasis is on deference to rather than ownership of the state. He isn't really championing citizenship at all but rather the notion that we should all be regarded as subjects of the Crown.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Listen to Helena Kennedy and Lord Goldsmith discuss Britishness and citizenship ceremonies here. What do you think?

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The following is in today's Mail. We've carried quite a lot about Lord Goldsmith who has as many jobs as Tony Blair, questioning whether anyone would want to buy citizenship from such a man back in October. The comments on the Mail article are interesting. Some say 'quite right' and 'about time' others, "I wouldn't mind swearing allegiance to the Queen, but to King Charles? No thanks." or "I would NEVER swear any oath of allegiance to ANY member of the royal family. They are a bunch of parasites sponging off the taxpayer. I would NEVER allow my children to swear such an oath either before they reached the age of majority." The point is, are we to become a modern democracy - or how long do we have to suffer this attempt to modernise feudalism?

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Hold on a second. I was reading the Evening Standard on the way home when I saw this a report by Keith Dovkant. Irritatingly the paper seems not to post its content when it is published. He reports that the now dead oligarch Patarkatishvili was with Berezovsky and other kindred ex-Soviet plutocrats in London yesterday where "The group had just held a five-hour long meeting at the City law office of Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney-general who acts for them".

Suzy Dean (London, The Manifesto Club): A couple of weeks ago the Manifesto Club hosted a mock version of the citizenship test that everyone wishing to become a British citizen must now pass. In reality, as Jon Bright has already commented on these pages, it proved to be vacuous and superficial. And with questions such as "What is the population of Wales?" and "Why was there a fall in the number of people migrating to the UK from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the late 1960s?" it couldn't have been less practical. But its disconcertingly abstract quality is no accident: it expresses a view of citizenship that is grounded not in the lives of citizens, but the minds of politicians.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I am getting more than irritated by the way the government is playing with the democratic issues it says matters to it so much. First, it has cocked up citizens juries now it is gaming with citizenship. If you asked yourself who from the Blair lot is the most inappropriate person to review what it means to become a good citizen, Lord Goldsmith would be close to the top of any list. How can one trust the straightforward honesty of the man who by all accounts was pressured into changing his mind on the legality of the Iraq war, and who agreed that the inquiry into massive corruption associated with BAE Systems should be stopped just when the definitive evidence was about to come into police hands? Is this how we want the future citizens of Britain to behave? Wouldn't anyone from abroad who did things like this fall into the category of those Gordon Brown would send back to where they came from?

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): Yesterday, the Social Market Foundation released its latest publication AntiSocial Britain and the Challenge of Citizenship, by former Labour MP Peter Bradley. OurKingdom couldn't be at the launch as it had been "booked out for weeks" - anti-social Britain, it seems, has never been so popular! They would not even let me stand at the back. From what I can gather, Bradley's main proposal is to use the tax system to reward those who volunteer for community service and penalize those who do not. But won't this ensure that no part of society, not even its charitable activities, will be outside the marketplace? The "challenge of citizenship" here seems to be how to privatise it. If so this is another way of trying to turn us all into consumers.